


Marshland Misadventures

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Should Never Have Existed [14]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Awkward Crush, Drabble, F/M, Fallow Mire, Fever Dreams, Mild Gore, Non-Canon Inquisitor (Dragon Age), Rescue, Sick Character, Sweet, Tumblr Prompt, Undead, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 12:23:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15315432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: Two one-shots dedicated to the little mishaps endured by a very, very non-canon Inquisitor (see the overall series description for context) in the Fallow Mire, mostly revolving around his crush on Cassandra.





	1. Making Camp

Navigating these dark, dismal marshlands has turned so profoundly frustrating that Varric, for one, comes very close to ripping out all of his chest hair while slinging dramatic curses at ‘bloody nature’. The others are hardly better off, and as soon as ducking behind yet another glistening, rain-washed rock formation reveals a more or less sheltered clearing they decide to have a little rest.

A blinking turquoise barrier dome to block out the rain that keeps bleeding out from the clouds’ swollen belly; a sizzling rune on the ground for warmth (because a campfire would have sucked all air within the protective bubble) - and they are all set.

‘I do hope you appreciate the good fortune of travelling not with one but with two Tevinters,’ Dorian remarks with a grin, before swaddling himself into a blanket cocoon and carefully perching on a rock that he subjected to very close preliminary scrutiny, lest it serve as a home for some slinking many-legged critters.

Cassandra huffs, with a habitual expression of distaste crinkling up her face - but she cannot pretend that she does not enjoy being warm and dry. Soon she, too, settles down, taking out a stack of paperwork from her pack. It’s a bit crinkled around the edges from the moisture - but Cassandra’s furious scribbling makes it suffer far worse damage.

'Still struggling with that report on last week’s expedition?’ Varric teases her, peering over her shoulder. 'You know, I could ghost-write it for you… As a little favour that I will suddenly remember in the future if you ever decide to throw a table at me’.

'I am perfectly capable of writing my own reports, thank you!’ Cassandra blurts out, her glare almost searing the longsuffering hair off Varric’s chest. 'I just… need to focus and…’

Completely without warning, she whips her head around and turns her scorching gaze from the dwarf to the Inquisitor, who has also found a dry nook for himself, to go over the research notes that he keeps turning to whenever he is not closing Rifts. Only instead of leading through the rain-splattered paper, he has frozen with his eyes on Cassandra’s profile, vividly highlighted as it is by the aura of the barrier. Absorbed by the sight, a vague smile just barely touching his lips, he has neglected to be inconspicuous - and so Cassandra has grown very, very aware of being observed.

'Inquisitor, will you kindly stop smiling like that?!’ she exclaims, lifting her soggy writing to her face so that only the crimson tips of her ears are visible. 'I cannot… I cannot stop messing up my sentences!’

'My apologies,’ he replies, with a nod of understanding. 'That was undignified… Perhaps disturbing. I shall not distress you like this again’.

What he is not aware of, however, is that behind her fluttering paper shield, Cassandra is smiling back.


	2. Fever

There is no air. He keeps searching for it, taking frequent, loud, desperate breaths, so strained that something begins to crack within his chest with every rise and fall - but does not find any. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how painfully he strains his lungs, so aching and weary and begging to be filled - there is no air. Just more and more of this clammy watery mist, oozing ceaselessly everywhere like blue slime, trickling every fold of his clothes till they begin to constrict him, heavy and solid as some manner of invisible title shell, filled up to the neck with icy slush. He does not remember the last time he felt his arms or legs.

 

Damn it, his body can't be failing him again! This is getting ridiculous! He still has not recovered from the humiliation of flopping helplessly about on his bedding - not once, but twice! First, when a pride demon used him as a bloody claw sharpener; and then, when he almost froze to death amid the endless, barren whiteness of the Frostbacks. There is hardly anything he hates more in the world than being sick or wounded; being at his weakest, most helpless, most useless, when there are others relying on him. His son, first and foremost - but also, all these people who expect him to seal Rifts, to rescue peasants, to get barbarians in line... To perform all these duties he was entrusted with after that failed escapade at the Temple of Sacred Ashes turned him into a so-called Herald of Andraste.

 

He forgets the warming that he himself gave his companions, who know (who cares) how many centuries ago - that disturbing the water awakens the corpses. Those poor wretches once expired in the worst agony from his nightmares, trapped in the stifling, rotting grip of the plague, and are now resting on a bed of dark gooey silt, from where they are sometimes pulled by the compulsion of the spirits. A soft circular ripple, running from a curious hand that has touched the oily surface of the bog pool, or from a clumsy foot that has slipped off the lopsided walkway, is that it takes for them to rise, streams of water running like sweat down their desiccated carcasses, with their gumless yellow teeth bared in a snarl and their burning purple gaze always unmistakably finding the prey even though the... contents of their sockets are long since mangled to blindness and turned to squirming maggot nests. A pleasant little detail that he is certain he will now be seeing in his usual dreams about his boy turning into one of these things (those have gotten rarer, now that he is working together with the Spymaster's Warden friend to find a cure for the Blight, or at least a means to make it dormant, but he still has... bad nights).

 

Disturbing the water awakens the corpses. But he... He forgets. Driven by a sudden, barely conscious wish to check if he looks as miserable as he feels (a vain Tevinter will always be a vain Tevinter, he supposes, even when numbed by the chilling breath of a southern marsh), with his movements so wooden that he might as well be a shambling cadaver himself, he leans over the black mirror of the bog... And gasps.

 

Instead of the dismally grey standing stones and the limbs of dead trees that stick out like gnawed bones, the pool is reflecting intricate golden spires, and massive many-leveled towers with smooth steep walls, and polished domes as azure as the desert sky, and glittering jets of fountains that soar taller than the most majestic structures in the background, every ribbon of water (clear, jewel-like water, so unlike this infected muck) swathed in a rainbow cloud.

 

Barindur. What he is seeing is Barindur - the lost city of Tevinter, famed for its glimmering grandeur and mystical healing springs; one the jewel of the ancient desert, now erased off the face of the earth overnight, after its king, in his hubris, had invoked the wrath of the old gods.

 

He and Dorian were just talking (well, 'just' in relative terms, as he currently does not have the very best grasp on the passing of time) about this legend, having accidentally stumbled upon a southern retelling of it in a waterlogged little booklet that lay abandoned in one of the plague-marked homes, little more than a pile of swaying, moist planks at this point.

 

A bedtime story, perhaps, read by a weak-voiced, red-eyed mother to a feverish child, as an attempt to play pretend that everything was going to be fine in the morning. Except that, before dawn broke, both of them were swallowed by the disease's rancid maw, like everyone else here. He once lulled his own child to sleep with this very same tale - the proper, complete, Tevinter version - or, well, tried to. The poor baby got it into his head that the eldritch city-snatching forces were going to come after Minrathous next, and spent the entire next day coming up with the most elaborate trickery to make papa stay at home in Asarie, where it was safe. He did not share that part with Dorian, of course, or with anyone else: what a parent finds adorable, a grown child treats like a stigma of eternal shame.

 

This must be why he is getting this vision now: the spirits, which are thick in  the (nonexistent) air here like gnats, must have crept into his weakened mind and used his memories of that recent conversation to play a trick on him. He is certain of it, at the back of his mind - but that part of his brain seems to have turned as numb as his frozen limbs, and any thoughts trapped in it find it hard to break through the fog of increasingly festering sickness.

 

Mesmerized by the phantasm in the water, with a vacant smile wandering over his blank face, as though he had been subjugated by blood magic, he kneels in the soggy moss and, ignoring the vaguely familiar voice that cries out in alarm far, far behind his back (the dwarf... It's the dwarf, right?), stretches forth a trembling hand in an insane hope that, any moment now, he will feel the caress of those ghostly fountains.

 

Quite naturally, that never happens. The only thing that his fingers meet is squelching, stagnant marsh water; and the moment he breaks its broth-like surface, a pale white hand shoots up from beneath and grabs him by the wrist.

 

The next few seconds blend into a whirlpool, both figuratively and literally. The grip of the awakened corpse has an unbreakable, steely tightness to it, as if he were clapped into shackles again, back in the cell underneath the Haven Chantry, where the Inquisition locked him up after he staggered out of the Fade, disoriented and doubling over with the pulsing pain in his greenish, flame-engulfed hand. He tries to shake the cursed thing off, but his reflexes are too slow; and the flops of his arms, too weak - so before he knows it, the risen corpse manages to drag him under, into the pitch black of the night made liquid. The sickening feeling of there being no air reaches its peak; his chest burns up in a shattering burst, as though impaled - and after that, comes an odd sense of release. Of serene, floating calm. It is that deceptive coziness of falling asleep in the snow all over again - but just like last time, he does not have it in him to shake it off. At least, if the undead creature is chewing off his flesh, he will never feel it. He will never... feel anything.

 

High above - or beneath, or to the side; there is no way of telling, and his brain is half-dead already - a voice rings out, warped and garbled by the water. A familiar voice again, but not the dwarf's this time. A woman's voice. Her voice. Oh, he was so stupid to gawk at her like a smitten pup last time they made camp; he swore to never bother her like that again - for the sake of her dignity, and his - and yet, he cannot keep himself under control, can he? Even as he is losing his last shreds of consciousness, his thoughts turn to her.

 

Or maybe... Maybe the woman that he is hearing is his late wife, whom he still misses so ardently after all these years. Whom he still recalls, time after time, even as the piercing pain from the repeated realizations that he will never again turn around to see her entering the room, never again stretch sleepily in the middle of the night and hear her mumble his name by his side, never again feel her hand on his shoulder or her fingers over his, gets mixed in with the deep-running longing for this new, unexpected light in his life, the brave, strong, dependable Seeker, whom he must not even admire from afar, because she will never feel the same way about him.

 

Or maybe it's the both of them. His wife flickering into the Seeker and back again, like that woman he saw in the Fade when the frost was draining life out of him. The only solid shape that stood next to him on a tiny island that had manifested in his fever dream and kept shrinking by the second, as there were cotton-like snow clouds closing in on it from all directions.

 

She came to him, this woman who was his wife one moment and the Seeker the next, and urged him - ordered him - to remain conscious, to fight against the cold; she kept him teetering on the edge of oblivion, exhausted and senseless but not quite giving in, until help arrived. Perhaps now... she is trying... To do the same...

 

'Dorian, light!' the voice commands, splitting into a hundred pounding echoes - and suddenly, a purple claw of magic rips through the inky pall. With the darkness pierced, he can see where the pool's surface is, lit up from the other side by mage fire and moulding into large ripples like a thick chunk of purple glass. He can also see fuzzy chunks of mud floating about him, raised from the bog bed by his own threshing; and the drowned undead, swimming up to him, clicking their jaws hungrily, more and more of them floating up from the unseen bottom; and the pearly necklace of bubbles that coils upwards, the final puffs of air escaping from his lungs; and then... And then, a female silhouette, with spiky short hair and a half-loosened rat-tail braid trailing after her, kneading laboriously through the water towards him. He thinks he can spot that she has removed her armoured boots - to lessen the ballast, probably - and rolled up her padded leggings to the knee; her legs, flashing through the swampy murk, are working hard to both propel her forward and to give a powerful kick to the encroaching undead. Kaffas, he is about to drown, and still he focuses on her legs?! If those pale, wiry, rotten-clawed corpse hands do not crush him first, utter shame will...

 

To chide himself like this is his last conscious impulse before his vision goes black again.

 

It does not stay so for long, though. Or so he assumes. Time still eludes him - hasn't it always?

 

All that he knows is, at some unspecified later point, he jolts to a staggering, confusing awareness of the world around him - awakened by the feeling of a tremendous, greyish-green stream of water scraping its way up his throat till all of his insides burn raw with retching. A pathetic spectacle, for certain - and what makes it even more humiliating is the fact that he has witnesses.

 

After he coughs out the finishing    helping of sticky, gooey, drool-like marsh water, he gradually registers that he has been hauled out on (so-called) dry land, next to one of the Veilfire beacons that their little  expedition has been lighting up, to make cleansing the marsh easier. The ground underneath him thrums with the heartbeat of a fire rune, of the same kind that they used to keep their campsites warm - Dorian's work, and excellent one at that. And there is the boy himself, closer to the water's edge. Slinging blasts of vivid golden flame with that practiced, deceptively careless flourish of his, to shoot down the undead the moment their deformed, worm-infested heads poke out from the bog, some with lily pads wobbling on top of their half-exposed skulls like little green jelly  hats (which would have been comical had it not been so utterly disgusting).

 

The dwarf is doing the same, except with his crossbow - and the Seeker... The Seeker is right here, squatting down by the side of his dismal, bedraggled self, still out of her armour and with her hair sticking together into greenish-black icicles.

 

He catches one glimpse of her stern expression, and her wet, clingy undershirt, and hurries to close his eyes. He is not on the verge of death any longer; he has no excuse to ogle her.

 

'You are going to freeze,' he says hoarsely.

 

She responds with her trademark 'Ugh!', and he really does hope that he has not started smiling at her again. When she is frustrated, it makes her so... No. He swore to never bother her again.

 

'No thanks to you,' she says sharply - and then something in her voice shifts a little.

 

'What were you thinking?! Provoking the undead like this?! I would expect that from a child, but not from a grown, responsible man!'

 

Grown, responsible man. One could say that again.

 

'I was... I was delirious, I believe...' he mumbles. Lying like this, with his eyes closed, does little to clear his foggy mind.

 

'I saw something in the water... That was not there...'

 

He hears an abrupt intake of breath, and then feels a bare palm being plastered over his forehead.

 

'You are burning up!' the Seeker exclaims, her scolding intonation gone without a trace. 'Why didn't you tell us sooner? What if it is... remnants of the plague?'

 

He unglues his tired, bleary eyes, his heart plummeting down like a collapsing dwarven elevator. That pain in her voice - he knows it. He has lived it. He is still haunted by it in those nightmares of Blighted corpses.

 

'I am certain that it is just your regular case of northern hothouse orchid... spending too much time in the cold and rain...' he reassures her in a whisper that he takes great pains to keep coherent. 'I was going to just... down a healing potion when no-one was looking'.

 

The Seeker rolls up her eyes.

 

'Nonsense! We will be making camp right here, and I will have Dorian heal you properly!'

 

'I suppose it won't do for you to have your Rift-closer malfunctioning,' he lowers his gaze again, clearing his throat.

 

'It's not that!' she protests - and, his body suddenly turning light and hollow on the inside, he feels a flush of heat splash across his face and neck.

 

She will likely write it off to fever - she had better - but just in case, he decides to throw her off the trail by coming up with an extra, spur-of-the-moment excuse,

 

'A bit embarrassing, is it not? You saving my life so many times, and me being so far behind... The pride demon does not count... because, even though it was my intention to save you, you still ended up saving me'.

 

'Maker's breath, you are not keeping score, are you?!' she asks in astonishment. Well, the distraction from the real reason behind his blush - her moving concern for him - seems to have worked.

 

'Just wait until I shake off this little bother of a cold, Seeker. A Tevinter does not suffer losing'.


End file.
